Tuesday, March 23, 2010

"Closing libraries is always a bad idea, but for the Google generation, it could be disastrous. In a time when information literacy is increasingly crucial to life and work, not teaching kids how to search for information is like sending them out into the world without knowing how to read."

By Sara Scribner. Read the entire article at this linkshare on: facebook

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Sharon Talmadge the Librarian from La Costa Canyon High School wrote about our pilot there! She was a great host and it was wonderful meeting at her library and with her students. Read what she has to say!

Anne and Renee spent an entire day at La Costa Canyon High School demonstrating yolink and helping students explore it. The students were working on a poetry assignment which we had emailed to them ahead of time. Anne and Renee based the demonstration on their assignment.

Yolink was especially helpful for one aspect of the assignment which was to find a quote by the poet they were researching. By using the keywords [poet’s name] and quote or quotation, they could see in the expanded links that YoLink provided which result had all the keywords without clicking and reading each result.

Renee taught them how to do their work more efficiently. The students grasped immediately that the expanded links with the keywords (each keyword being a different color) would save them time. Yolink also has other features which save students time. One of them is an icon that when clicked gives the student the citation for the result in EasyBib, all written out in the correct order with the correct punctuation. Save and share options just require a click. The part of the result with the highlighted search terms can be shared with Diigo, Evernote, Blogger, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress.

Again, it was wonderful meeting with Sharon at La Costa Canyon, another successful pilot of yolink!
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Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Recently, the yolink team had the pleasure of working with teachers and students at La Costa Canyon High School in California. We wanted to share a story from one of those classes.

The assignment the students were working on was to search Popular American poets. The students had to choose a poet, identify the technique, include biographical information about the author as well as quotes, and discuss the influences/motivation/inspiration for that poem.

Yolink came in very handy for this project. We showed the class how yolink's 'scan text' option helped them find quotes related to say - poetry or work or creativity. The students were smart and picked up on yolink really fast. They were soon using yolink to the best of its abilities. Some really good insights from this trip included a quote that we often end up quoting - "Whenever you get out in the real world, no matter what job you have, you need research. And its not what you know, but how can you find it."

I'm sure that just as they surprised us with their instantaneous liking of yolink, we surprised them with yolink's capabilities.
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About Me

The yolink education blog is your resource to stay updated on any yolink education news. Our team and guest contributors will be posting stories about education, technology, online searching and 21st Century Skills. We will also keep you posted on who and where we're visiting as part of our yolink in the classroom pilot programs.